October 25, 2024

When, at the age of 19, I first read Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye’s landmark book on the poet and visionary William Blake, I was exhilarated by the promise of the imagination.  Blake asserted that reality is not given but created.  It only seems stubbornly resistant because of the passive state of our imaginations, which are largely dormant, half asleep.  Synchronicity played its role in the book’s overwhelming impact on me:  it was the spring of 1970, and change was in the air. 

It seemed as if we were on the verge of a vast awakening, as if something utterly transformative was about to happen.  It became my faith that there was a creative power within the mind that could change the world for the better.  “Faith” is the right word: this is what religion I have, and in 50 years I have not recanted.

But in that time I have learned that even the imagination has a dark side, what Jung called a shadow.  If the imagination is what we know of God, then Jung is right that even God has a shadow, which, as he said in Answer to Job, would explain some things about his unjust and inexplicable ways.  Most people did not want to hear this, but I, who since adolescence had been rebelliously angry against God, found it gratifying that somebody, at least, was honest.  The dark side of the imagination is paranoia. 

The first step in understanding this is to recognize that while reality is mentally created, it is not created by the ego, but by a much deeper level of the mind about which the ego knows very little.  There is an objective reality for the ego.  The ego is, as Lacan said, constituted by a split, the split between its subjectivity and a world objective to it which it has not created but must cope with, the famous subject-object split of modern philosophy.  The infant at first does not distinguish between self and other and has to learn the distinction slowly.  It is basically solipsistic.  Hamlet says that he could be bounded by a nutshell yet count himself king of infinite space.  If he could truly do so, it would be a regression to the state of infancy.  But that would be anything but a return to some unfallen state.  If the ego created its reality, it would have no ground or foundation to touch base with.  Once, while visiting friends, I got up in the middle of the night and, because I had forgotten to turn on the night light before going to bed, got lost in pitch blackness in the middle of the room.  I could not find the bed, the door, or articles of furniture by which to orient myself.  I was probably not lost for a long time, yet it seemed so.  It was a mildly horrible experience, and I hope never to repeat it.  We feel the need for some kind of “consensus reality,” as it is sometimes called, to reassure us that we are not lost in a void, not in free fall, where there is no up or down.  This is why solitary confinement is a terrible punishment, the closest human beings can come to the experience of hell.  Hell is complete isolation, a state that Blake called Ulro, as close as we can come, short of complete nothingness, to the imagination’s complete absence.  At the bottom of Dante’s hell, the worst of the damned are completely encased in ice, completely apart from one another.  Psychologically, it symbolizes a complete breakdown, catatonia, the mind hunched in fetal position. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called such a complete psychotic rupture “foreclosure,” which I always thought was a brilliantly expressive choice.

One way we cope with isolation is to talk to ourselves—keep ourselves company, make ourselves into our own other.  If you live alone, you may know this, hoping it’s not a bad sign. We have all passed people on the street who are talking to someone who is not there.  In literature, the state of disturbed isolation is sometimes represented by an endless, obsessive monologue, the model for which is perhaps the soliloquies of Hamlet.   I have spoken in other newsletters of Hamlet as the work of literature that defined the alienated condition of modern consciousness.  Every time Hamlet is alone, he drops into a soliloquy, or, perhaps more accurately, allows what seems a running interior monologue to surface.  The monologue is not a thought process working its way towards a conclusion: rather, it revolves endlessly like a moth around a light bulb.  Some critics have called the isolated monologue the quintessential modern form.  It appears in the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, whose “epic,” The Ring and the Book, is an experiment consisting of various characters’ interlocking monologues, a technique used by Virginia Woolf in The Waves and Faulkner in As I Lay Dying.  Elsewhere in poetry, it appears in the monologues of T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” and “Gerontion, and, in prose, in the in-your-face diatribes of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, who is what we would now call a troll.  Trump’s “speeches” at his rallies have devolved increasingly into a kind of solipsistic rambling.  With his usual shrewdness, he has tried to claim that the irrational stream of associations is in fact evidence of his brilliance, what he calls “the weave.” But they are really soliloquys, despite being delivered in front of thousands. It was a stunning representation of his mental state recently when he simply stopped speaking and swayed to his own music for 40 minutes in front of the crowd, lost in his own head.

Which brings us to an election less than two weeks away, the most fateful election of our time. We are all getting neurotic, and for good reason.  I have lost count of the number of articles I have read that are asking, “How can this election be so close?  Can Trump supporters not see that Trump is disintegrating before our eyes, that he is suffering from mental illness which is growing dramatically worse at a rapid pace?”  But Trump supporters have created their own reality. That is what I mean by the dark side of the imagination.  They have had, of course, a lot of help:  the vast resources of Fox News and right-wing social media have been deployed to create an alternative reality for 45% of the American population.  I don’t know what you call it, but there is an icon at the bottom of my laptop screen that will cause news stories from the entire range of journalism to pop up. It has caused me to at least glance at headlines of right-wing articles that I would never normally even see, let alone read.  It has been an education for me in the way that Fox News and the right-wing news sites mislead their viewers by the relentless saturation-bombing intensity of their negative stories.  If you followed these sources, you would believe that, instead of the race being neck and neck, the news for Harris is ever more dire.  How can this be wrong?  There are so many stories, and they are so consistent. If she wins, millions of people will think there has been cheating because it will contradict countless stories that have been appearing every day for a long time.   These are not editorials attacking Harris:  they pretend to be objective reportage of the facts.  Even those who are not MAGA fanatics are likely to say, “Well, what’s going on here?  This seems suspicious.  There should be an investigation.” 

However, as I have said before, we do not yet live in a dictatorship in which the news is controlled and no alternative sources are available.  People can read real journalism, which directly contradicts what they have been told, and choose which they will believe.  But they choose to believe the lies, which means they choose to believe a message of threat, fear, and hate. They choose paranoia. We have to hold them responsible for this, even though we are becoming increasingly aware that what happens, at least sometimes, is less like a deliberate choice and more like a kind of possession.  There are no doubt Trump voters who fit the stereotype of the rural rubes so naïve they will believe anything, but lack of intelligence or lack of education or even lack of accurate information is not the problem in many cases.  We are in the midst of a psychic epidemic, and paranoia spreads by contagion to those who are for whatever reason susceptible to it.  There are a disturbing number of sophisticated, educated professionals who, for no apparent reason, are slowly drawn into the orbit of conspiracy theories, Robert Kennedy, Jr. being only one of the most prominent.  The difference between conspiracy theorists and a cult is that the latter finds its focus in a charismatic leader.  Once people are in the grip of delusional thinking, there is nothing on earth that can talk them out of it.   What will happen to the true MAGA believers if Trump loses?  There will be massive disorientation, but eventually the cultists will do whatever cultists do when the world does not end on Tuesday as promised. 

The alternative reality that Trump and his followers live in is a narcissistic world.  To avoid a collapse into solipsistic isolation, the ego adopts the strategy of projecting a world outside itself, but it is a mirror world.  The ego looks at it and sees not a genuine other but itself reflected.  In Richard II, Shakespeare portrays a ruler who is Trump’s opposite in many ways, yet who shares Trump’s narcissistic grandiosity.  Richard thinks that because he is “God’s anointed” he can do anything without consequences.  But he finally crosses a line and confiscates the estate of his deceased uncle John of Gaunt because he needs money, whereupon the rightful inheritor, Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, deposes him.  Richard is so out of it that he genuinely seems to believe that, because he is king, nature itself will rise up against his enemies (in his case spiders, not sharks).  He is as refined as Trump is crude, yet, like Trump, he excels in playing the martyr, until, finally, his self-destructiveness brings him to play it for real.  In fact, he is not really a leader at all—he is an actor, which is why Shakespeare is fascinated by him.  He has an infallible sense of theater, and appalls his political followers by making decisions for theatrical rather than political reasons, such as surrendering when he does not need to, descending slowly from the castle walls proclaiming, “Down, down, down I come, like glistering Phaeton.”  It is one hell of a photo-op, and he cannot resist it.  Trump is the same.  He began as an actor, and remains one, which is why he is constantly obsessed with the size of his crowds.  In the end, though, Richard pays a fatal price for assuming that his ability to make his own reality has no limits. 

That is why the commonsense view insists that we do not make our own reality.  What we call reality is the sense that there is a “there” there, in Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase.  Reality is given, like it or not, and maturity is the slow process of coming to accept the fact that reality is indifferent to our wishes and fears.  It is possible to view history as a developmental process by which the whole human race recapitulates the development of the individual, which is a process of maturation through disillusionment, a gradual, painful relinquishing of narcissistic grandiosity.  Freud saw the development of scientific method, which is essentially a training in impersonal, objective detachment, as an instrument of progress in this difficult sense.  Science reveals the objective universe of nature, but by doing so clarifies something about human nature, demystifying mythology and religion by showing that their beautiful human-centered cosmos, which is the stage setting for a drama of human redemption, is nothing but a narcissistic projection.  In a famous statement, he asserted that the history of science was marked by three progressive blows to human narcissism.  The first was the Copernican revolution of the 17^th century that showed we were not the center of the universe but an insignificant speck in an alien cosmos.  The second was the Darwinian revolution of the 19^th century that dethroned humanity from its position of superiority to the animal kingdom.  The third, in the 20^th century, was the psychoanalytic revolution that shook the ego’s confidence that it was master in its own house. 

Freud’s book on religion is called The Future of an Illusion, and it sees that future as one of increasing secularism, a prognostication that, so far as Europe is concerned, has turned out to be largely true.  But there is always the possibility of being in denial, and Spengler in The Decline of the West said that when civilizations declined into decadence, they may undergo what he called a “second religiousness,” a defensive revival of magical thinking as a defense against increasing doubt.  That is why fundamentalism has developed into Christian nationalism, a kind of fascism that views politics as a form of religious war.  The culture wars are desperately trying to prop up an idealized white heterosexual self-image that is clearly narcissistic: the heroic white race upholding civilization against the onslaught of non-white, deviant, criminal savages.  Narcissism implies an image in a mirror, and, since the ego cannot create, that image has been created by an imagination press-ganged into the ego’s service.  When the ego gazes at the glorified image of itself, it suffers what Jung calls “inflation,” resulting in megalomania.  Ye shall be as gods, the serpent promised Eve, and this is what he meant.  Megalomania, being based on a lie, is defensive and sensitive to criticism that echoes its own doubts about itself.  It is thereby paranoic, seeing enemies everywhere, for the attacks of potential enemies are not just military but verbal.  The enemy is anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes. 

Jung was born in 1875, and therefore witnessed two world wars, dying in 1961 just before the Cuban missile crisis showed how close we were already to a third.  His late writings are deeply troubled by the question that poses itself for us now on the eve of the American election.  Is the human race always going to be vulnerable to this?  Is history a pattern of cyclic repetition of decline and fall—a decline not by some entropic failure of energy but of an active predilection for evil, a psychological version of the doctrine of original sin?  Will there never be any real peace, just an anxious waiting for the next wave of paranoid illusion, inflation, and will to power to arise?   It is hardly a new question.  It was already staring at us in Modernist literature a century ago, along with popular writing from that era such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, upon whose pages the shadow of Nazism fell.  It is the message of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Cox Richardson, both in her Substack newsletter called Letters from an American and her newest book America Awakening, that the anti-democratic power drive that threatens America right now has threatened it from its beginnings.  The human race is its own enemy, and, if it destroys itself, it will be through a misuse of the imagination, which is more dangerous than all the nuclear bombs in the world.  For as a matter of fact, as the film Oppenheimer showed, it was the imagination that created the bomb. 

I would say that, in one way, there is no peace.  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and to be human is like living with a congenital illness that is not necessarily fatal but incurable.  If you grow up with superhero and adventure stories, you are conditioned to a view of the world as dangerous, with peace just a brief episode between adventures, a short vacation between super-villains.  Or, if you prefer your lessons from more respectable sources, there are the critics, ancient and modern, for whom the greatest literary works are those informed by the tragic vision, a canon more inclusive than the genre of dramatic tragedy.  “Count no man happy until he is dead” is an aphorism occurring in several Greek tragedies, and of course even without the spectacular catastrophes of literary heroes, from Achilles to Oedipus to Beowulf to Hamlet and Lear, even the luckiest life is inevitably tragic, because it will end in the deaths of friends and lovers, the decline of health, and the disappearance of the world in which one was young and so very much alive.  Yet natural decline is not what we are speaking of.  Aging is not the result of error or some kind of defect in human nature that makes it inherently self-destructive.  Nor are we speaking of “tragic” accidents.  We are speaking of misery that was avoidable, and yet chosen out of neurosis and malice.  Is such misery inevitable, and the only response a kind of stoic resignation? 

The answer to such an ultimate question can only be personal.  I think there is always the possibility of selfish evil.  We are not going to perfect the human race.  But there is also always the possibility of a counterforce that can not only triumph against the next wave of nihilism but work progressively to make such outbreaks rarer and less destructive.  The Bible rejects the “tragic view of life,” unfolding a vision instead of a divine comedy.  It is not that the Bible has any illusions about the innate goodness of human nature.  Adam and Eve fall, one of their children murders the other for no reason other than narcissistic envy, and ultimately God has to drown most of the human race and try again.  This time, though, he declares to Abraham that he will intervene and save humanity from itself.  Making Abraham’s descendants a chosen people is only one aspect of a redemptive plan that will work itself out over the course of human history.  Instead of supernatural intervention from the top down, however, since the Romantic period a new mythology suggests a power working from below and within.  It too attempts to change the outcome of the cycles of history, but not just by making sure that the good guys win.  The deeper need, as Christianity has always recognized, is to transform the good guys in a way that moves opposite to the temptation of the narcissistic will to power.

The hope is that the imagination can recreate human experience in a way that turns narcissistic paranoia inside out.  Paranoia is fear and hatred of the other, a desire therefore to dominate or eliminate the other.  Instead, the imagination leaps across the gap between self and other, self and world and identifies itself with the other.  The verbal expression of such an identification is the metaphor, A is B.  The title of my doctoral dissertation on Dylan Thomas, many years ago, was Unending Lightning, a phrase from one of his poems.  The full line reads, “For the moment of a miracle is unending lightning.”  I have spent much of a lifetime since then, most elaborately in The Productions of Time, arguing that this is not airy-fairy mysticism.  Despite critical theories of an earlier time that claimed there was no such thing as identity, only difference, that is impossible, as even common sense may realize.  Identity and difference are what Blake called Contraries, and we cannot think one without the other.  Any attempt to do so is verbal sleight of hand.  I have plagiarized from German Romantic philosophy the admittedly clunky phrase “identity-in-difference” to express this paradoxical yet inevitable concept, following in the footsteps of that greater plagiarist, Coleridge, whose version of it was “multeity-in-unity,” his definition of beauty.    

But we can throw away such shorthand and point to the evidence of the imagination’s power to make connections and identifications in the most basic experience, starting with the sensory, starting with our experience of the body.  To the extent that I think of my body as a hunk of meat in which my consciousness is somehow imprisoned, I am trapped in the dualistic subject-object split that has led people to treat the body as an alien other and either dominate it or transcend it.  From the ascetic tradition of medieval Christianity to modern eating disorders, the body and its physicality, including its urges, has been condemned as a recalcitrant other.  Yet our consciousness is a bodily consciousness, as yoga has always known.  In a famous passage, T.S. Eliot quoted approvingly a line from John Donne, “One might almost say her body thought” as an example of what he called “unified sensibility.”  He was reacting against the Victorian propensity for writing cut-off-at-the-neck reflective verse conveying Great Thoughts in the form of vague abstractions.  But it is a general truth:  our bodies do think.  We wake in the middle of night and find we have changed position.  Who made that decision?  Not the ego, which wasn’t there.  I play something on the guitar without thinking and “muscle memory” remembers the moves and guides my fingers.  So far, research has failed to come up with a convincing theory of consciousness, and I suspect it is because the theorists start from the subject-object paradigm.  If they started from a premise of identity-in-difference, perhaps they would get somewhere. 

The environment affects me because I am on a deep level identified with it.  A century ago, critics derided imagery in which the weather expressed human emotions as the “pathetic fallacy.”  “No, it doesn’t rain because you’re sad.  It rains for scientific reasons that have nothing to do with anyone’s emotions.”  Attempting to be sophisticated, such critics showed themselves to be naïve about both human nature and poetic imagery.  The weather, the seasons, the four elements—they are part of us and we are part of them, yin-yang fashion.  The Gaia hypothesis in which everything in nature is so connected that it can be considered one vast organism has been dismissed as unscientific irrationalism, but it is akin to Alfred North Whitehead’s “philosophy of process,” which said that, because nature is not a collection of things but a process, everything is everywhere all at once.  From a famous passage to that effect in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World Northrop Frye derived his central concept of “interpenetration.”  Whatever one thinks of Whitehead’s theory, it cannot be dismissed as the noodling of an airy-fairy treehugger.  This is the man who collaborated with Bertrand Russell on the Principia Mathematica, the attempt, as ambitious as it is difficult, to derive a total theory of mathematics—not an intellectual lightweight. Whitehead cites the Romantics, particularly Wordsworth, as predecessors for his idea that reality is a process.  And before the Romantics, there were esoteric traditions such as alchemy based on a psychic interaction between mind and matter. 

That none of this is mainstream is exactly the point.  It challenges the current paradigm, and of course it is easily mistaken for a kind of magical thinking that really is crazy—Richard II trying to get the earth to rise up against his enemies.  But if you want to talk crazy, let’s talk about political candidates who boast of beating dogs to death with shovels.  What is the point of that?  Precisely to show that they are tough and unaffected by all that sensitive talk about the sacredness of life.  If life resists you, beat it to death with a shovel.  Emotion about animals is weakness.  What characterizes the insanity of our time?  The refusal of connection, let alone identity, and the consequent reduction of others to “things.”  It goes right down the line: “I am a capitalist and do not care what pain and damage my business practices inflict upon others.”  “I am rich, and I will manipulate the political system to my benefit however I can.  I do not care if society collapses, because I live apart and will survive, insulated from the chaos.”  “I am an Internet troll, and do not care about your snowflake feelings.  I trigger the libs because it gives me a rush of power.”  “I am a strong male, and you as a woman exist to serve, obey, and gratify me.”  “I am a mass shooter, and you are no more than targets to me.”  

The climax of Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” occurs when the main character, a grandmother, in the last moment of her life snaps out of her self-centered narcissism and says to the murdering criminal called the Misfit, “Why, you’re one of my own children,” and reaches out to touch him.  She has broken through to a sense of identity, to the knowledge that we all belong to one another, are all involved in one greater identity.  The Misfit’s response is to shoot her as if she were a dangerous snake.  And she is.  Her gesture, at once verbal and physical, tempts him to lower his defenses and emerge from his protective shell, to be one human being face to face with another.  She is more dangerous to him than 20 gun-toting cops. 

One weapon that paranoia uses is projection.  The 4Chan conspiracy theory at first seems utterly senseless.  Democrats are secretly Satan worshippers?  But Blake said two centuries ago that many people who call themselves Christians are really worshipping the devil.  And that was true from the beginning.  Jesus was crucified by people who turned him into an “other”:  a dirty Jew, a poor and disreputable homeless person, a political subversive, a mocker of pieties.  In other words, he was exactly what the extreme right is angered by today.  The Crucifixion was not a one-time event.  They are still crucifying him.  He is still on the cross, in agony.  The central parable of Christianity, that of the Good Samaritan, would be anathema if the Christian mob only thought about it.  They believe in charity, but only to their group, to those who belong.  Their tribalism is exactly what Jesus tried to break through with his universalism, and they nailed him for it. 

But the triumph of the othering crowd is not inevitable.  People may change, and in doing so stop living in hell on earth, the paranoid prison that the Bible calls a furnace of iron, burning with anger kindled by fear.  They may change their identity, and in doing so change their world, because the two are one.  That is what genuine “conversion” is about.  Is mass transformation possible?  A previous newsletter answered, yes, and it has happened.  I was not at Woodstock, but, then,  neither was Joni Mitchell, yet she understood it enough to write the song about it.  However, mass phenomena tend to be transient, as evanescent as a flash of joy that surprises us, as it did Wordsworth.  But let us not be too cynical: the effects of that moment of joy and hope may be lasting, and provide a foundation for building something that is more permanent, building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, as Blake put it in his famous hymn. 

Hence what we may call second-phase Romanticism.  The Romantics thought that the French and American revolutions were harbingers of a total apocalypse.  But the French Revolution went bad in the traumatic way that a beautiful romantic relationship crumbles into nightmare.  The lesson to learn was that peak experiences, as Maslow called them, whether individual or social, are Sabbath moments.  For brief moments, we live in paradise, maybe even in eternity, and then we are back in time.  But that is the wrong way to say it, for the paradisal or eternal moment is still happening, outside of time, the kingdom of heaven that Jesus said is within us.  The Crucifixion is always happening, but so is the Resurrection.  After the Sabbath moment, we are back to six days of work, and our work is changing people’s perceptions one at a time.  Mass epiphanies are fine, but real change is one imagination at a time.  The role of the arts is obvious here, but we cannot afford to worry about the size of the audience—that is a reversion to narcissism, best left to the likes of Trump.  Two or three gathered in the name of a greater vision may have to be enough.  The same is true of education, which is never “mass.”  You teach one student at a time; you reach one student at a time, and once is a miracle not to be underestimated. 

Despite our fear, we are fascinated by each other, drawn to each other.  Watch a small child first encountering an animal, looking intently, touching tentatively, trying various moves, some of which don’t work, like twisting ears.  And animals know it is a child, and usually exhibit an astonishing patience, even while suffering various indignities.  That’s us.  Sex, genuine sex and not exploitation, is the same way, exploring another body with all five senses, another reacting and individual self, and being explored in return.  At a climactic moment, the walls of partition may fall down like Jericho, but what remains after the ecstasy, as the Renaissance called it, is, ideally, a sense of mutual identity that Charles Williams (one of the Inklings along with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) called “co-inherence.”  His vocabulary was Christian-mystical, so his model is the Trinity: “That manner is said to be by the ‘co-inherence’ of the Divine Persons in each other, and it has been held that the unity of mankind consists in an analogical co-inherence of men with each other” (92) (the masculine gender term is even more misleading here than usual).  The Trinity:  three persons, united, but not by being identical clones.  Lovers:  two people who are “other” and yet united, no matter what the genders involved.  I must admit that “co-inherence” is a lot better term than “identity-in-difference.”  The arts are instruments of co-inherence: fiction and poetry open windows for us into other people’s beings.  When I look at a painting, I see with another’s eyes, one who sees far more than I see.  When I listen to music, I enter another’s emotions or am enraptured by the beauty of their sense of order and pattern.  In the Paradiso, Dante in heaven says he has to be “transhumanized,” his senses expanded beyond the ordinary, to take in eternity, but there is always something transhumanizing about the experience of art. 

Utopia could be defined as a community in which paranoia has been, not eliminated, but brought under control.  Sometimes utopias are engineered, with a manifesto as a blueprint guiding a project of deliberate construction.  The United States is an engineered utopia of this sort, designed by the Founding Fathers and still, like some of the freeways around here, under construction after 200 years.  But social engineering has its dangers, especially when the beautiful plan runs up against the limitations of reality.  There is another kind of utopia that is not engineered, not controlled, but grown from the roots up.  I think we have been living amidst a grass-roots utopia since the 60’s.  Last week I was teaching an excerpt from a graphic novel whose theme was pronoun choices.  Pronoun choices are choices of identity, and the idea that identity is an individual choice rather than a social role is a utopian idea.  The idea that identity is polymorphous, not just sexually but in every way, and not reducible to a standard binary, is another utopian idea. 

The graphic novel form suited the theme because the format was interviews with real-life people, who talked about their language choices while we could see that those are part of a whole array of choices—of hairstyle, clothing and jewelry, conversational style, even body language.  This is what it is to teach:  I meet and talk with students, experiencing the intricacies of their individuality—which may be different from their peers (one may use “she/they,” another “they/they”), different in their own understanding of the difference between, say, “nonbinary” and “genderqueer,” and which may change next week.  Some science fiction writers have used the term “heterotopia” to denote a pluralistic utopia, and, to point out the obvious, it is such proliferating difference that the paranoids react to with utter panic.  Me, I’m an old hippie, and would like to feel, if invited, that I am among kindred spirits.  Go look at the photos of the ways we made ourselves up in those days.  They called us “freaks” and we adopted the term for ourselves. 

So what happens to consensus reality in such a carnival community?  It still exists, but inwardly.  “If you prick us, do we not bleed?  If you tickle us, do we not laugh?” says Shylock, challenging the anti-Semitic Christians of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.  There are universals, what Northrop Frye calls primary concerns, and these will unite us so strongly that we will not need the conformism of identical outward appearances and behaviors. 

Such a utopian community, if it were possible, would live in an environment in which nothing was totally other, not even a stone.  Blake asks how do we know but that every bird that cuts the starry way is not an immense world of delight, closed to our senses five?  Keats answers the question: by the imagination.  The poet loses his identity, he says, and becomes the sparrow pecking outside the window.  Science gives us the cosmos of the subject-object split.  To that extent, it is an alienated and inhuman cosmos, in which human life is of no consequence.  But that is not the whole truth, for the universe science has shown us is potentially, at the same time, to the eye of the imagination, both beautiful and sublime, more so than the limited Ptolemaic cosmos it replaced.  I recently viewed the northern lights above the waters of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio.  Blake also said that, if the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is, infinite.  The problem with the universe of science is that the doors are still closed.  If they were opened, we would be transhumanized, and both reality and ourselves would undergo a change into something rich and strange.  We have seen that paranoia is nihilistic, contracting into an isolation that asymptotically approaches Nothing.  The imagination moves in the opposite direction, connecting and identifying, reaching towards a total identity, an All for which there is no adequate name, so we will have to be satisfied with “love.” 

Reference

Williams, Charles.  The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante.  Noonday Press, 1961.